


A knife is a terrible thing to waste

by FlamingoQueen



Series: Fossilized [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (also pronounced "coping mechanisms"), (it's pronounced "coping mechanisms"), (no one grows any feathers I swear), Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky's knives, Crack Treated Seriously, Dinosaurs, Established Relationship, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Side Effects, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Super Soldier Serum, The History Channel, Time Travel, Vacation, feathers - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-01-23 07:10:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21316225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: Bucky might put on a grumpy face about all this, but this sort of thing is right up his alley. In a lot of ways, this is the stuff of Bucky’s childhood dreams, even if he doesn’t remember those dreams. He’d always been reading stories about people stranded on islands, stranded on Mars, stranded in cave systems. Space travelers, sailors, explorers… It’s not really a surprise that Bucky wants to make a boat and go see what’s further down the prehistoric coastline.Whatisa surprise is Bucky’s idea that they ought to do this without using the knives.(Or: Steve and Bucky have "The Talk" about prehistoric knife rationing.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Fossilized [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1489358
Comments: 16
Kudos: 46
Collections: Happy Steve Bingo 2019





	A knife is a terrible thing to waste

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the fifth installment of the series based on my Happy Steve Bingo card! This is for B5: Super Soldier Serum Side Effects. <strike>It might help if you read the earlier parts, but it shouldn't be absolutely necessary.</strike> As Jaded_Queen has pointed out (thank you!), it is more than merely helpful to read the earlier parts of this series. Part 2, in particular, will give you the necessary background. ^_^

“Really, Bucky? Stop using the _ knives _ so much? _ Now? _ As in, _ before _ we start chopping wood?”

How are they supposed to construct a boat without using the knives? 

It makes sense for Bucky not to rip any more tree branches off with his metal arm, yes. They are in perfect agreement about that. They already had The Talk about rationing Bucky’s metal arm so that it would last longer without maintenance. But how are they supposed to cut down trees and shave off bark and hack down palm fronds and split up wood fibers and… 

Bucky merely raises an eyebrow—essentially, a “yeah, I said that, fight me” response—and continues ever-so-carefully ripping the blue and yellow feathers out of the broken-necked dinosaur that flops limply in his lap with every yank.

Bucky’s got three different feather piles going, organized by intended use, Steve supposes. Some feathers are soft and downy and will probably be useful as bedding, padding, whatever. Some are stiff and have a wider quill that will be useful for… poking things, maybe. It’s hard to anticipate for sure, given the creative applications Bucky’s been coming up with for items they encounter these past two-going-on-three months. 

There’s a pile of in-between feathers that actually go in a basket—another of Bucky’s creations—that are destined for some purpose Steve can’t even begin to guess at. Maybe just for tossing later, and thus the basket for easier transport. Who can even tell, anymore? 

Whether any of these feathers are intended to contribute to their boating project is anyone’s guess. He can see Bucky trying to weave feathers into a sail. Can’t see it _ working_, but they have an awful lot more time on their hands than he’d have thought a hunter-gatherer duo would have, and Bucky can be eerily patient. Maybe he _ could _make a feather sail.

Steve watches him for a minute, sitting there with that flopping dino-turkey hybrid, blue feathers getting everywhere and Bucky giving not a single fuck about the mess. It looks like a blue and yellow pillow exploded… and left behind a clammy, pale-skinned bit of poultry equipped with longer than necessary legs and a toothy maw where a beak ought to go.

He blows a floating tuft of feather hairs out of his face, because naturally the wind would blow this project with all those little interlocking feathery fluffs all over the place, spreading the pillow carcass into the ferns and beyond. There’s a scientific name for those hairy bits of the feathers, he knows. Barbs, maybe. Barbules. He’s never had a cause to learn the anatomy of a feather. 

Part of him thinks “Sam would know all about feathers,” but another part of him is vaguely disappointed that he’s had a thought that would be more at home in Bucky’s head. It even sounds kind of like Bucky. _ Sam would know all about feathers, _ Bucky’d say. _ Being a bird and all. _That’s what nearly three months of rubbing off on each other will get, he guesses.

Anyway, it isn’t like they’ve used the real names for anything else so far, so feather hair is fine. Demon school bus has stuck for that massive pterodactyl they keep seeing on occasion. And Godzilla, though they’ve only run into him twice. He’s pretty sure one of the types of long-neck out on the plains area is a brachiosaur. The rest… yeah. 

The Christmas grackles with their red and green. The blue gobblers Bucky finally named, with their blue feathers dabbed with yellow at the tips and their guttural warbles. The nessies with their long necks and flipper paddles. The sharknados, easily three times the size any shark has a right to be, punting those nessies out of the water like an orca with a baby seal, and serving as all the reason anyone but Bucky would need for _ not _going into the water.

Bucky’s having a blast with all the designations. Steve doesn’t have to guess or assume there. It’s in Bucky’s eyes and the way they light up whenever he sees something new and different enough from the rest to warrant another designation. He’s even excited when Steve contributes a designation, like the death lobsters.

Bucky’s having a blast with a lot of this, really. He puts on a grumpy face about it, and he no doubt would prefer to be home, and he’s bound to be worried about all of the same things Steve’s worried about… and more besides, what with his fixation on the History Channel. 

But this sort of thing is right up his alley, the survival element, the cobbling things together to get by, the adventure. In a lot of ways, this is the stuff of Bucky’s childhood dreams, even if he doesn’t remember those dreams.

He’d always been reading stories about people stranded on islands, stranded on Mars, stranded in cave systems. Space travelers, sailors, explorers… They’d tried to make a boat out of some pallets down at the docks only to be chased off by workers who still needed those pallets. It’s not really a surprise that Bucky wants to make a raft or a canoe or anything else that floats and go see what’s further down the coastline.

What _ is _a surprise is Bucky’s idea that they ought to do this without using the knives at all. Of all their supplies, the knives are about the only useful things they have for this project. Not using them seems… odd. A little self-defeating. Paranoid.

And early.

“Already, though?” he asks. “We couldn’t use them to get set up and _ then _ conserve them going forward?”

“If you want to destroy a knife, Steve, cutting down enough of these prehistoric pine trees to make a sea-worthy vessel of any kind is right up there at the top of the list, next to trying to slice up rocks. We’ll use one knife—just the one—to _ split _ some wood, but we are not _ chopping _ wood with my knives.” 

He doesn’t let up with the feathers, and doesn’t even keep his eyes on Steve when he continues. “We’ve got three arms we can use to tear off branches and strip them down, and the one knife for batoning and the like. If you want to chop down a tree, you be my guest, but you’ll have to make do with a sharp rock.”

A sharp rock. Steve can’t for the life of him see that being successful. So that means they’re making a boat out of trees that are already fallen down, or maybe baby trees that are still thin enough they can be hacked down with rocks or torn down with some leverage and super soldier strength. 

He supposes that’s doable, for a given—that is, small—size of boat. A one-man dinghy, maybe. He doesn’t see how a dinghy will serve them well on the prehistoric maybe-ocean Bucky means to sail on except as a proof of concept. He also doesn’t see how anything big enough to be useful can be made sturdily enough out of what would essentially amount to scrap wood.

But where there’s a will (of Bucky’s), there’s going to be a way (also of Bucky’s). By now, Steve really ought to be content with letting whatever insanity Bucky comes up with be the order of the day, if only because that insanity has been so damn successful to date.

And he’s definitely content to follow where Bucky leads. Bucky hasn’t lead him wrong in… well, ever. And somehow, Bucky seems relatively well-equipped for survival among the dinosaurs, despite being pretty much not-equipped-at-all in the sense of material gear to work with.

So maybe they really can build a boat with scrap wood. Maybe the equivalent of fallen logs will get them across what might be an ocean. Maybe they can manage all that… without knives.

Steve sighs. Bucky _ does _ have a point about ruining the knives. He’s been pretty careful this whole time. Bucky is always pretty careful, about everything. Right up until the moment he isn’t, and caution becomes a four-letter word.

“If you’re waiting for me to give you my blessing to fuck up one of the true loves of my life,” Bucky says, attention still on his work, “then you might as well do it sitting down. Conserve some energy, because you’ll be waiting until the comet flies in. Meteor. Whatever it is that nukes all our dino friends.”

Steve isn’t waiting for a blessing. He knows he won’t get one, and he suspects he doesn’t actually need one. Neither one of them is willing to truly fight with the other when they are all they have in the entire world, but literally this time. He’s willing to wait for an explanation, though. Just to hear Bucky out, try to understand the logic woven through the massive hangup lurking under the surface.

Because right now, he suspects it is not all about the knives. There’s something else under there, and it’s iceberg-big down where he can’t see it. He hopes it’s not about leaving potentially fossilized knife marks on wood and thus alerting the History Channel and the dreaded Ancient Aliens man to their prehistoric existence. 

But he also suspects it might be.

Because without something like that going on in the background, this is too soon by far for Bucky to start thinking about preserving the edges of his beloved knives _ by not using them_. Not using knives that are available to be used in situations where it would actually make sense to use them is not something he’s been able to accuse Bucky of since the War.

Sure, spending two-going-on-three months in a past so far away they can’t even narrow it down to a few thousand years is a long time in unfamiliar territory. And, sure, Bucky tends toward paranoia these days, more so than he ever did before the War and all the rest of it that followed. But those things can’t possibly have already added up to anything so extreme as having The Talk about their meager supplies and the necessity of rationing said meager supplies. 

He knew he’d be talking Bucky down from this particular ledge if they were stuck here long enough. Stuck _ now _long enough. He just thought he would be doing it at least another month out. Maybe two. Ideally, they’d be home before he had to have this argument and they could maybe skip it.

Bucky would turn over one of the knives while they were sitting on their sofa in the Tower, and he’d gripe about how the blade was chipped or worn, and Steve would say that it got them through half a year in the land before time, so it was a knife well sacrificed. But no. They’re having this talk now, instead.

Bucky seems to sense his unspoken dismay stretching out into their otherwise mostly companionable silence, and looks up from his defeathering process. He folds his arms in the way that Steve knows means both “yes, really, Steve” and also “you’re an idiot, but I love you anyway.” 

And because that affectionate quality pings back against something inside himself, Steve knows he’s lost the argument. Bucky will get what he wants, and Steve will shrug and march in step. He hopes it’s nothing too wild.

“Okay,” he says, settling cross-legged in front of Bucky. “Tell me why we have to stop using the knives.”

It used to be exactly the opposite way around, he muses. He’d dig his scrawny stubborn feet in about something, they’d agree to disagree for a few minutes, and then Bucky would sigh, put his hand on his hip like his back hurt him to concede the point, and Steve would prevail. 

Usually, it meant they would drag themselves back home with righteous bruises from a cause well-defended, and Bucky would grouse about having been right all along, they should have just let it go, the other guys were bigger and meaner, and so on, and Steve would out-stubborn him into letting it drop until the next local injustice.

The scales started to balance out during the War, with Bucky prevailing as often as Steve did, and the both of them a mixture of foolhardy stupidity that somehow succeeded on the one hand, and bitter practicality that saved their necks when the stupidity didn’t work according to plan on the other hand. 

It used to drive Peggy nuts listening to the two of them trade sides, first one speaking sense and then the other, and sometimes neither. But the Howlies always got a kick out of it, and Howard was just as full of carefully not-thought-out brilliance.

But somehow, in the discussion of whether they should be using the knives to achieve their—Bucky’s and therefore his as well—goal of getting out onto the water, Steve has the feeling Bucky’s arguing for both teams. It’s rational practicality (yay) taken to a paranoid extreme (not so yay).

“Think about it,” Bucky says. “Which option would you feel worse about, Steve. Option one, we conserve our supplies until and unless they are absolutely necessary, and we get home—somehow—only to find that we’ve done things the hard way and didn’t have to, after all.”

Bucky slides on a fairly good impression of Steve’s “aw shucks” act, hand on the back of his head and everything. “Oh well,” he says, full of feigned good-natured charm, “chuckle chuckle, what a fun story to tell.” Bucky gestures to one side with the current trio of freshly yanked feathers, as though piling all of option one to the right. 

“Option two,” he says, now waving vaguely toward the left and dropping the impression, “we use our gear at every opportunity and end up having nothing to fall back on in an emergency because all our knives are dull, all our belts and laces and straps are worn and busted, and we’re shit out of luck in the middle of the land time forgot. Nice knowing you,” he grouses. “Guess we’re dino kibble.”

Bucky holds out the three feathers, long ones with thick quills. “Strip the fluffy colored shit off the sides of these. I’m making needles for a sewing kit, and in the name of togetherness, you’re going to help.”

Steve raises an eyebrow, but takes the feathers and starts… de-barbing them, he guesses. De-hairing them. De-furring them? He doesn’t ask what Bucky intends to do with turkey-dinosaur bird needles or a sewing kit. If it’s anything beyond repairing their clothing when it inevitably rips or repairing themselves when one of _them_ inevitably rips, then he’s sure to find out when the time comes. 

He’d prefer option one of the two Bucky presented, same as Bucky. If they _ are _stuck for more than a few more months—they won’t be; the symbols will start cooperating any day now, he’s certain of that—then option two starts to become more and more likely. But it’s only been three months. While they’re still no closer to returning to the ruins than before, it’s too soon by far to embrace option one with open arms and blind devotion.

Of course, option one will never cease being hilarious on the retelling, and will only get more hilarious the earlier they adopt it. Telling Barton they made a portable palm tree lean-to to put on their guesswork-patchwork pine-log boat so they could camp downstream from their base, all while using only a few sharp rocks and a lot of swearing when they had nearly half a dozen knives at their disposal… well, it’ll get a laugh. 

Option one is undeniably the safer choice, too, just because any version of option two is kind of disastrous.

And Steve knows a lost cause when he sees one. Changing Bucky’s mind is that lost cause. So he’s already decided he’s going to let Bucky have this one, and not just because it makes sense to conserve supplies and it’s got the potential to make a good story later on.

There’s another reason, and that’s the huge underwater chunk of this paranoid iceberg that Steve can’t see directly, but knows is there. And he just _ knows _he’s right. It’s got to be the History Channel thing again, just in another form. 

Every time they use their modern-day equipment, they have something more to hide from the geological record than if they were using just the things around them. Trying to hide crisp, clean knife marks is harder than trying to hide blunter, bludgeoning marks from nearby rocks.

And if Steve can keep Bucky calm—or even just avoid upsetting him unnecessarily—on that front in any tangible way at all, it’s worth it. That Bucky hasn’t used “_knife marks_, Steve” as an argument is a good sign, but not a guarantee of any sort. 

Apparently, Ancient Aliens left an indelible mark on Bucky while Steve wasn’t paying attention. He’d kind of like to go forward in time just for the opportunity to strangle the guy with the funky hair.

They’re two full moons and a chunk of change into this “vacation” thing, and if anything, Bucky’s gotten a little _ more _neurotic about the notion of discovery, even while deciding to build boats, which is going to spark a whole world of modern-day controversy if even part of a boat is discovered. 

That Bucky can hold both of those ideas in his mind at the same time—avoid doing anything that stands a chance of being fossilized, and also construct a floating vehicle sturdy enough to travel in—is a testament to his mental willpower. And Steve isn’t upsetting that balance if he can help it.

“There are a lot of options in between one and two,” Steve says, which is true, and a valid point, and probably the wisest approach they can take, sanity-wise. “Option one point three, we reserve some of our stuff for the eventual worst case, and we use the rest of it like it was meant to be used.”

Steve idly twirls one of the stripped-down feather spines between thumb and forefinger. It’s kind of fun, and that doesn’t say much for him in the “easily entertained” area. Or, it doesn’t say anything good, anyway. It certainly says he’s become easily entertained.

“Or option one point seven,” he adds, “we table the options until we’ve been stranded here a whole year and it’s really looking hopeless. Just for example.”

“First off, stranded _ when_.” Bucky wields their joke like a weapon crafted from pure sarcasm, and he’s as good with it as with any other knife. He doesn’t seem keen on rationing that one, either, unlike the actively useful physical knives.

“Second off,” he says, “how do you propose we ‘split’ the gear? Whose belt is going to be useless in three months and whose bootlaces are going to be worn to frayed ends and knotted in twelve places to keep them in one piece?”

Bucky plucks the stripped feathers from his fingers and dumps the blue gobbler on Steve’s lap to replace them. “Feathers, piles. Careful not to tear the skin. I’m using that.” 

Steve nods and starts easing feathers out of the disturbingly stretchy, rubbery skin. The poor thing flops like a dead chicken, which is basically what it is. Still seems pretty alien, the way the skin seems to suck and pull at the end of the feathers and then let loose with an inaudible pop. He wonders if modern birds do this, if actual turkeys have skin that moves like this blue gobbler’s does. 

He’s also glad he’s always approached Thanksgiving from the non-kitchen side of things. This is a side of turkey he would rather skip.

“And, actually,” Bucky adds, not looking up from where he is using the smallest of their knives to very precisely shave the flexible end of a quill down to a fairly stiff, angled three inches, “why is one year the cut-off for looking at options? Why not half a year, or two years?” 

Bucky inspects his work, the pointy bit for poking and the angled end with the slit in it for whatever palm fibers he’s planning to make thread out of. The makeshift needle meets whatever degree of approval is required to get stashed for later use, and he picks up the next bit of stiff feather spine. 

He looks back at Steve, and his face and voice are almost unnaturally calm when he speaks, like _ he’s _ actually afraid of upsetting _ Steve_. “When do we decide we’re giving up on the symbols?”

That’s the first time “giving up” has been voiced as an option, and Steve’s not going to think about that. Bucky will drag it out of him later, and he won’t put up too much of a struggle when that time comes, but he’s not dwelling on it now. He’s not even acknowledging it now. Nope. Not happening.

What’s happening is that they’ll be rationing their knives, not using them to build Bucky’s boat or the shelter or anything else that stands a chance of dulling the blades too early. What might also be happening is that they’ll ration the rest of their supplies. They’ll do that eventually, whether they start now or later. The only real question is how far Bucky’s going to take this survival strategy. 

To date, Bucky has already found them a reliable water source before Steve’s water bottle ran dry, cobbled together a platform of palm fronds partway up a tree so they wouldn’t be on the ground when they slept, and relocated their entire camp to a pleasant little cave with a rocky overhang and a couple of smooth rocks to sit on.

He’s found them two good fishing spots, a massive dead palm with lots of dry fronds and branches to use for fires without the tang of burning pinewood, and easy paths to two edges of the forest—to the plain and to the shore. He’s decided right nine out of ten times when it came to a plant that wouldn’t make them puke, taught Steve to catch a fish with his hands—though he’s not great at it, yet—and woven three fairly useful baskets. 

And an increasingly huge ball of twine that Steve has to admit is way stronger than it looks.

Bucky has brought down a dozen pterodactyls, seven of the “little” land chickens, three blue gobblers, and a baby long-neck that was in the wrong place at the wrong time when Bucky was feeling peckish. Steve doesn’t dwell on the specifics of that last one’s final moments, though he’s glad they ended up getting three days of quality meat off it before they had to dump the rest of the carcass.

They’d eaten some of the long-neck raw, because Bucky had declared it “healthy enough to almost get away, and therefore probably not disease-ridden enough to hurt us, and besides, I’m fucking hungry.” But most of it had been carved in big chunks and grilled on pine embers after all the tarry yuck had been burned off the wood. 

Fresh pine wood, he’s learned in the past three months, makes for some truly disgusting fires and worse meat, but it’s not so bad if you let the worst of the resin smoke away first. Then, it’s apparently okay to cook with it. Or maybe _ they _can cook with it after that because they’re enhanced enough to deal with the fallout, just another of the thousands of unexpected bonuses of the serum. Maybe it wouldn’t be so doable for the rest of their absent team.

Definitely the rest of the team wouldn’t be stomach-ache free eating the equivalent of a small cow that’s been sitting around—or, hanging around to keep it ventilated, and damn, that’s strong twine—for a few days. And the rest of their team would probably also have a hard time with some of the plants, or with the water they haven’t been boiling because Bucky decided it was “safe enough for the two of us” that first day.

Either way, baby long-necks are good eating whether raw, cooked in big slabs or sliced thin and air-dried into jerky. Which is unfortunate for the baby long-necks, given their adorable faces, but very fortunate for the pair of super soldiers who spent three blissful days actually not being hungry.

But the point is, Bucky has more than proven himself to be capable of doing whatever it is that needs doing—anything from surprisingly domestic homemaking to wrestling adorable baby dinosaurs to the ground and slashing their incredibly long throats. This “let’s not use the knives” initiative could be it, the bottom of his bag of tricks. 

Or he could have more tucked away ready to make Survivorman look like Little Miss Muffet. 

Steve’s got no idea how extreme Bucky’s willing to get about this Jurassic survival thing, this knife-rationing thing, this prehistoric sailing thing… And if there were a hotel room a day’s hike back, it would be fun and only a little unnerving to find out. There _ is _ no hotel, and it is way more than a _ little _unnerving at times.

Poor baby long-neck.

The thing is, technically, they’ve both got some degree of wilderness survival training, and they’ve both roughed it before on plenty of occasions, for plenty long stretches of time—and they’ve both done pretty well at it. 

But Steve’s skill set is somewhat outdated and based on war-torn European countryside with a pack full of supplies, a team at his back and a farmhouse at least every few miles. Bucky’s is fresher and a little more along the lines of “here is a knife and a spare pair of socks, Soldier; meet us at these coordinates on the other side of this uninhabited mountain range in one month or we’ll go in after you _ and you won’t like that_.”

In theory—and, so far, in practice—if one of them is right about what it takes to survive in pure, never-before-seen wilderness with fuck-all for supplies, it’ll be Bucky. It’s not like there will be a helicopter search party with floodlights and megaphones. If they’re getting rescued, it’ll be because they rescue themselves. With… Steve heaves an internal sigh. With magic symbols.

Steve stifles a groan about those stupid symbols, and then Bucky’s words filter back through his mind. He skips over that brief note about the possibility of giving up on the symbols—they aren’t doing that, aren’t ever doing that—and picks out a different little distressing tidbit lurking in Bucky’s points. His fingers freeze on the current feather. Cutting back on using the knives, rationing their supplies, splitting their gear, whose bootlaces… 

“Wait,” he says. “You want us to stop using our _ bootlaces?_” Even outdated, semi-wilderness, team-based, well-equipped survival skills tell him they want their boots almost more than they want Bucky’s knives.

“Eventually,” Bucky says, like this is pure common sense and not insanity, “we’re going to wear our boots down to nothing. And maybe we can weave some palm tree sandals and maybe we can’t. Might as well start to build up some calluses while we’re still fresh enough to walk it off. When our boots aren’t wearable, we can repurpose the leather and the insoles and all the rest. Get more use out of them.”

“You _ want _us to get blisters. For fun. When we don’t have to.”

Bucky gives him an exasperated sigh. “If we were Sam, or Tony, or even Nat, we’d be better off keeping our boots until they fell apart and using that whole time to develop our replacements. But we’re scientifically enhanced, unnatural freaks.” 

Steve wouldn’t quite put it that way, but he does have to agree with the statement. Super soldier has a much nicer ring to it than unnatural freak, though.

“Trust me,” Bucky says, “when we get enough calluses on our feet, our serum will shrug its shoulders, roll its eyes, and accept _ that _ as the new normal. That means no more aches and no more pains because you’re _ supposed _to have feet like that and so there’s no problem for your feet to report back to your brain. Getting to that point sucks, but once you’re there…” 

He points the knife at him. “And if we do that, get our feet broken in, then we aren’t left with zippity-squat when our boots fall apart and turn into leatherbound swiss cheese. We’ll have some solid components to repurpose. I can’t wait to have a decent sling and a pouch sturdy enough to hold some projectiles. _ That’s _how we’re going to take down a full-grown long-neck. I sure as fuck can’t tackle one of the adults without becoming a weird-shaped pancake. And I don’t think there’s twine strong enough to rig a snare. And we’d still be digging a pit trap when they all went extinct.”

It’s Steve’s turn to sigh. Great. This is how far Bucky’s taking prehistoric survival. He’s taking it all the way to bare feet. In a dinosaur forest. “We’re going to get dinosaur hookworm going around barefoot in the forest.”

Bucky shrugs, and then actually sets his third needle with the rest, unties his boots and takes them off, along with his socks. “We’re probably immune to that the same way we can’t get malaria, ebola, tapeworms, regular hookworm or loads of other shit like that.”

He tucks the socks into the boots and sets the pair behind him before hauling the blue gobbler back into his lap, because apparently Steve is taking too long with the feathers. “Look, I’ll go first. You can wait a month and then give it a go. That way if anything _ does _go wrong, it’ll only be one of us laid up with a dinosaur parasite and the other one can still chase off predators and fetch water and all that.”

Steve blinks at him. “You can’t get tapeworms? How do you even _ know _tha— Never mind. I know how you know it,” he mutters. Fuck HYDRA. Fuck “medical research.” And actually, fuck the serum that made all that research possible while still maintaining their captive’s fighting ability. Maybe unnatural freak is the right term, after all.

In countless ways, they’ve both benefited from the assortment of side effects that hitched a ride with the serum’s intended goals. But the other side of that coin is just as crowded. Your super soldier will not only survive but also will still be able to achieve mission objectives despite your testing? Why not test more?

Assholes. But he’s a hundred million years away from being able to do anything about it, so he’s not going to get upset about it. He _ isn’t_. 

He’s going to focus on the positives. Be a supporting figure. They can eat three-day old raw meat that’s been sitting out in the heat and humidity and not get sick. They can eat what is bound to be toxic plant life without getting sick… aside from ferns. Those are as terrible as they are plentiful. They can drink water that’s probably swarming with typhoid, or whatever invisible horrors water can have in it and not get sick.

Hurray for the serum. They’d probably be dead without it on day three of their shitty, shitty “vacation.”

Steve sighs again and runs his hands through his hair, then remembers about the questionable, fluffy mammal carcass he’d put his hands on earlier that morning and the bedraggled blue carcass he was just plucking, and sighs even louder. “I’ll go first for mites and head lice, then,” he groans.

Bucky grins and reaches forward to ruffle his hair with his metal hand. “Aw, pal, don’t worry. It’ll count as a medical emergency if you get scalp crawlies. We can use a knife to shave you bald.”

“It’ll be the highlight of my existence scraping a knife across my whole head to get rid of dinosaur lice, Buck.” And hopefully, if it does happen, it’ll be the weirdest, most horrible thing about this so-called vacation.

“Well, I’ll be honored to put my knife skills to good use when it comes to that. Won’t even nick you behind the ears.” Bucky adds a handful of down to the fluffy pile. “And look on the bright side—when it comes to lice, neither of us has to worry about anything further south than our necks.” He grins. “It’s the _ ticks _that’ll come for our junk.”

Steve tries very, very hard not to think about prehistoric ticks. Because while it’s true that something about the serum impacted their hair follicles, it’s probably just as true—and Bucky probably knows firsthand—that ticks aren’t going to care. 

“Should I be assuming that in the name of supplies rationing, we’re not shaving again until we get home?” Steve asks. “Or does stubble count as an emergency?”

“Stubble is not an emergency. Gandalf beards are, though. I’m not looking like an extra on Duck Dynasty when we get our asses out of here.”

“Out of now,” Steve reminds him.

Bucky glares at him, though they’re both equally responsible for throwing those little reminders into the air. “When we get our asses back to when we belong.”

“That works,” Steve says.

“Good.” Bucky rips out a few feathers. “That’s going to get old real quick, you know.”

Steve grins. “I’m good for at least ten more years of that joke.” He is, too. It won’t come to that, won’t be ten years, or even ten months. But if he had to… If it _ was _that long… He could do it.

“I’ll kill you for it in five,” Bucky grouses. But affectionately.

Steve watches as Bucky continues ripping out feathers. In so many ways, this is like field dressing the goose Dum Dum chased down at that abandoned farm. If he closes his eyes and lets his memory really breathe, Steve could probably hear Falsworth walking Bucky through it, Gabe’s colorful commentary masquerading as language lessons, Morita and Dernier arguing about how big the fire had to be.

In so many other ways, this is nothing like that goose, and this ferny pine forest is nothing like the hardwoods of the Black Forest, and all the animal calls are nothing at all alike. And it _ is _just the two of them, and not the whole team. But Steve feels kind of like they’re all here, anyway, haunting them in the best way possible.

It’s nice, actually, their personal past and this prehistoric past overlapping like this, remembered teammates watching over them. He wonders what ten more years would actually be like. If put on the spot, he might laugh and claim he could do this all day, but ten years is a lot longer than all day. 

And in addition to wondering what the ten years themselves would be like, what would _ they _be like after those ten years? He hasn’t aged much at all since he woke up. And Bucky was in and out of cryo that whole time and hasn’t aged much, either. Would they look and feel ten years older, or would it be like the time hadn’t actually passed, or had passed them by?

Ten years might not be a problem for them the way it would be for their team. Ten years… twenty, thirty, however many… When they make it back to those ruins, even if a few weeks have passed in the future while they were gone, would it matter if they’ve been stuck _ now _for a decade?

They might not be as affected by the passing years as others would be. They might be able to pick up where they left off—and when they left off—no matter how long they’re in the Jurassic.

What if this actually _is_ a sort of vacation after all? Just him, his best guy, some once-in-a-lifetime safari shenanigans… No distractions from the outside world because the outside world hasn’t been invented yet. No one to save or worry about but each other. No S.H.I.E.L.D., no HYDRA, no mad scientists, no grouchy governments, no war zones, no hostages, no aliens. 

Except maybe themselves if the History Channel catches them.

Steve looks off to the side where they’ve been drawing a few different potential raft configurations in the dirt with some sticks. Where Bucky’s been making little miniatures out of twigs and ferns. Where they’ve spent the last couple of weeks imagining their immediate future instead of poking at the symbols.

Technically, if he goes with the vacation-in-disguise theory, they’re at a dinosaur resort—very exclusive, very remote—and they’re planning to go on a cruise. Once they build a boat. With sharp rocks.

If only he’d been holding his whole sketchbook when time swallowed them up and spat them out now. This would make for an excellent entry in his vacation log.


End file.
